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Boy or girl? A simple test raises ethical concerns

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Author Topic: Boy or girl? A simple test raises ethical concerns  (Read 251 times)
William
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« on: August 09, 2011, 05:29:12 pm »

CHICAGO (AP) — Boy or girl? A simple blood test in mothers-to-be can answer that question with surprising accuracy at about seven weeks, a research analysis has found.

Though not widely offered by U.S. doctors, gender-detecting blood tests have been sold online to consumers for the past few years. Their promises of early and accurate results prompted genetics researchers to take a closer look.

They analyzed 57 published studies of gender testing done in rigorous research or academic settings — though not necessarily the same methods or conditions used by direct-to-consumer firms.

The authors say the results suggest blood tests like those studied could be a breakthrough for women at risk of having babies with certain diseases, who could avoid invasive procedures if they learned their fetus was a gender not affected by those illnesses. But the study raises concerns about couples using such tests for gender selection and abortion.

Couples who buy tests from marketers should be questioned about how they plan to use the results, the study authors said.

The analyzed test can detect fetal DNA in mothers' blood. It's about 95 percent accurate at identifying gender when women are at least seven weeks' pregnant — more than one month before conventional methods. Accuracy of the testing increases as pregnancy advances, the researchers concluded.

Conventional procedures, typically done for medical reasons, can detect gender starting at about 10 weeks.

The new analysis, published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, involved more than 6,000 pregnancies. The testing used a lab procedure called PCR that detects genetic material — in this case, the male Y chromosome. If present in the mother's blood, she's carrying a boy, but if absent, it's a girl.

Tests that companies sell directly to consumers were not examined in the analysis. Sex-detection tests using mothers' urine or blood before seven weeks of pregnancy were not accurate, the researchers said.

Senior author Dr. Diana Bianchi, a reproductive geneticist and executive director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, called the results impressive. She noted that doctors in Great Britain are already using such testing for couples at risk of having children with hemophilia or other sex-linked diseases, partly to help guide treatment decisions.

The research indicates that many laboratories have had success with the test, but the results can't be generalized to all labs because testing conditions can vary substantially, said Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a genetics professor at Florida International University. He was not involved in the study.

Simpson noted that using gender-detection blood testing for medical or other reasons has not been endorsed by guideline-setting medical groups and some experts consider it experimental.

Dr. Lee Shulman, chief of clinical genetics at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said the testing "isn't ready for prime time."

He said his hospital doesn't provide the blood tests, and doesn't offer more conventional techniques, including amniocentesis, to women who have no medical reason for wanting to know their baby's gender.

"I would have a lot of difficulties offering such a test just for gender identification. Gender is not an abnormality," Shulman said. "My concern is this is ultimately going to be available in malls or shopping centers," similar to companies offering "cute" prenatal ultrasound images.

Recent research found that increasing numbers of women in India who already have daughters are having abortions when prenatal tests show another girl, suggesting that an Indian ban on such gender testing has been ineffective. The expense of marrying off girls has contributed to a cultural preference there for boys.

Evidence also suggests that China's limits on one child per couple and traditional preference for male heirs has contributed to abortions and an increasingly large gender imbalance.

There's very little data on reasons for U.S. abortions or whether gender preferences or gender-detection methods play a role, said Susannah Baruch, a policy consultant for the Generations Ahead, an advocacy group that studies genetic techniques and gender issues.

 Angry

Consumer Genetics Inc. a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company sells an "early gender" blood test called "Pink or Blue" online for $25 plus $265 or more for laboratory testing. It boasts of 95 percent accuracy, using a lab technique its scientists developed from the type of testing evaluated in the new analysis, said Terry Carmichael, the company's executive vice president.

Carmichael said the company sells more than 1,000 kits a year. He said the company won't test blood samples unless women sign a consent form agreeing not to use the results for gender selection.

The company also won't sell kits to customers in China or India because of fears of gender selection, he said.

Medical techniques that can detect gender include amniocentesis, usually done at around 16 weeks, using a needle to withdraw fluid surrounding the fetus to identify abnormalities; chorionic villus sampling, done at around the 10th week to detect abnormalities by examining placenta tissue; and ultrasound, most accurate at around 13 weeks. The first two methods can slightly increase risks for miscarriages.
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« Reply #1 on: September 05, 2013, 05:24:48 am »

British Doctors Won’t be Charged With Doing Illegal Sex-Selection Abortions

British doctors found to be doing illegal sex-selection abortions will not face criminal charges, according to a new report.
 
Sex-selection abortion is an epidemic in nations like China and India, where cultural mores cause citizens to force male babies over females. But with people from those nations and other Asian countries where men are favored moving to nations like Great Britain, they are apparently taking the practice with them and finding abortion practitioners willing to do the abortions.
 
A government report earlier this year found signs that birth rates for girls and boys vary noticeably according to where their mothers were born. A health minister said that these differences in rates of male and female births among mothers of certain nationalities may “fall outside the range considered possible without intervention”.
 
In February 2012, two abortion practitioners in England were suspended for their roles in facilitating illegal sex-selection abortions as exposed by an undercover investigation the London Telegraph newspaper led. Now the Telegraph says they will not face charges.
 

Doctors who agreed to arrange illegal abortions based on the sex of an unborn baby have been told they will not face criminal charges, despite prosecutors admitting that there is enough evidence to take them to court, it emerged on Wednesday night.
 
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was accused of failing to uphold the law after it ruled that it would not be in the “public interest” to prosecute the two doctors exposed in an undercover Daily Telegraph investigation.
 
Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, on Wednesday night voiced alarm about the decision which he raised with the Attorney General.
 
The two doctors were filmed agreeing to arrange terminations for women who requested them purely because they said they did not want to have a baby girl.
 
One of the doctors did so despite likening the practice to “female infanticide” while the other told a woman her job was not to “ask questions”.
 
The CPS acknowledged, following a 19-month inquiry, that there was sufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution with a “realistic prospect of conviction”. But it told police that a “public interest test” had not been met.
 
Dr Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship, who was among those who complained to police, accused the GMC of failing to have the courage to apply the criminal law.
 
“We seem to have a situation where, at the whim of the CPS, procedures that are clearly laid out in the Abortion Act can be completely disregarded by doctors and the NHS,” he said.
 
“That seems to put doctors above the law and raises questions about the CPS upholding the will of Parliament.
 
“We seem to have doctors being allowed to reinterpret the law with apparent impunity – it is quite extraordinary.”
 
David Burrowes, a Tory MP on the All-party Parliamentary Pro-life Group, said: “I would be extremely disappointed if they [the CPS] were seeking to put themselves in the position of politicians and Parliament by trying to suggest that this is not an offence that should be preceuted.
 
“That is a matter for Parliament and not for prosecutors, I would be very concerned and very interested to look at whether they have overstepped the mark.”
 
Pro-life advocates have been up in arms about the illegal abortions.
 
LIFE Spokesman Mark Bhagwandin says “For too long the industry has consistently abused, and in cases flagrantly broken the law on abortion with seeming impunity. In an industry where in practice there is abortion on demand it is no surprise that some abortionists see no problem terminating an unborn child simply because it is the wrong gender.”
 
“So vague and open to interpretation is the wording of Ground C that in the case reported the woman did not have to state she had a problem with her baby being a girl as she could simply have presented for an abortion under mental health conditions as happens in nine out of ten of the 200,000 abortion cases every year,” Bhagwandin continues. “The abortion law is wide open to interpretation of what counts as mental health issues. Indeed the definition and diagnosis of mental health issues is regularly made by GPs who do not specialize in psychiatric evaluation. If so many women are suffering mental health problems and require abortion, we will have failed them if we do not see a role for proper psychiatric evaluation. Indeed this failure can easily be seen in the abortion statistics showing that one in every three women who has an abortion has had at least one previous one. These women are not helped by offering the abortion conveyor belt as a solution to their crisis pregnancy. Women deserve better than this.”
 
The Life representative added, “We share the public’s anger to the revelation of sex selection abortions; we would like to see a similar response to the wanton termination, up to birth, of disabled babies in the womb.  Surely it is as morally questionable to end a human life because he/she is disabled as it is for being of the wrong gender?”
 
Representatives with the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), a leading pro-life group in England, say sex-selection abortion is an inevitable consequence of easy access to abortion.
 
Anthony Ozimic, SPUC’s communications manager, commented: “This investigation confirms the reality of eugenics in modern British medicine, in which some innocent human beings are deemed too inconvenient to be allowed to live. Sex-selective abortion is an inevitable consequence of easy access to abortion, a situation to which the pro-abortion lobby has no convincing answer. The government needs to cut its ties to private abortion providers and to abortion rights organisations, as they are complict in sex-selective abortion domestically and internationally.”

http://www.lifenews.com/2013/09/04/british-doctors-wont-be-charged-with-doing-illegal-sex-selection-abortions/?utm
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« Reply #2 on: October 05, 2013, 06:12:49 am »

Britain’s Largest Abortion Agency: It’s Legal to Abort Babies Based on Gender

 The chief executive of Britain’s largest abortion organisation is asserting that women in the country are legally free to abort a baby based on gender.

Anne Furedi, head of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), states that women the law allows women to terminate their pregnancies if they are unhappy with the baby’s sex, and that the parliament does not need to create any clarifications on the matter.

The chief executive of BPAS made her views known in an article for the online magazine Spiked where she compared gender selective abortion to abortion after ****.

“A doctor agreeing to an abortion on grounds of **** would be breaking the law no more and no less than a doctor who agrees an abortion on grounds of sex selection,” she contended.

“There is no legal requirement to deny a woman an abortion if she has a sex preference, providing that the legal grounds are still met,” Furedi continued. “The law is silent on the matter of gender selection, just as it is silent on ****.”

Furedi’s comments come weeks after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided not to prosecute two doctors in England who arranged abortions for mothers who sought to terminate their pregnancies because they were carrying a girl. CPS ruled that it would not pursue the case against the doctors because it was not in the “public interest” to do so.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is seeking an explanation from the attorney general about the case, and why prosecution believes the case is not in the public interest.

“Gender selection abortion is against the law and completely unacceptable,” he said in a statement.

Dr. Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF), likewise expressed dismay and disapproval.

“We are very concerned at the fact that the CPS hasn’t thought to bring a prosecution in this case when in a letter we have had from the Metropolitan police, they have said that they did consider there was sufficient evidence for a realistic prosecution,” he stated in a BBC Radio 5 Live interview.

Andrea Williams, head of Christian Concern for Our Nation (CCFON), a Christian think tank in Britain, agreed. She said during an LBC radio interview that “t is not the job of the Crown Prosecution Service to decide not to apply the law.”

Furedi, whose organization performs a quarter of the abortions in England and Wales–over 55,000 a year–making it Britain’s biggest single abortion provider, has made other controversial statements in the past. In 2011, during a debate with William Saletan, a writer for Slate, she described the notion of late term abortion as “arbitrary and subjective.”

“There is no evidence to suggest that we need to restrict later abortions in any way by enforcing legal limit,” Furedi declared. “There isn’t any profound point at which you can say there is a difference between one kind of foetus and another.”

Abortion has been legal in the UK (with the exception of Northern Ireland) since 1967. Under current legislation, two doctors must agree that an abortion would cause less damage to a woman’s physical or mental health than continuing with the pregnancy.

http://christiannews.net/2013/10/04/britains-largest-abortion-agency-its-legal-to-abort-babies-based-on-gender/
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« Reply #3 on: October 05, 2013, 01:10:34 pm »

Quote
Under current legislation, two doctors must agree that an abortion would cause less damage to a woman’s physical or mental health than continuing with the pregnancy.

http://christiannews.net/2013/10/04/britains-largest-abortion-agency-its-legal-to-abort-babies-based-on-gender/

This was similar legislation Ronald Reagan pushed when he was governor of California(if a pregnant woman's psychiatrist came to this conclusion), which lead to over 1m abortions in that state subsequently, and all but opened the door for Roe V Wade to be made the law of the land.

And this was also the same belief the Southern Baptist Convention embraced(if having a baby would cause physical and mental health damage to the woman) before the USSC made Roe V Wade the law of the land in the early 70's.

Now people wonder why Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Wendy Davis have been given the national spotlight?
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